‘Stamped From the Beginning’ Review: Examining Racist Thought

The documentary “Stamped From the Beginning,” based mostly on the 2016 e-book by Ibram X. Kendi, begins with a trick query and ends with a sage retort.

“What’s wrong with Black people?” asks the director Roger Ross Williams of the movie’s heady roster of Black feminine students as they think about the methods wherein the slave commerce created anti-Black racism and, as Kendi argues, not the reverse. The formidable interviewees embrace the novelist Honorée Fanonne Jeffers; the historian Elizabeth Hinton; and the activist and scholar Angela Davis. When Davis discusses the work “not done” at slavery’s finish to retool “the entire society so that it might be possible for previously enslaved individuals to be free and equal,” her phrases are as muscularly poignant as they’re pointed.

The subtitle of Kendi’s e-book is “The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America.” And Williams employs a number of strategies to distill the National Book Award-winning tome’s ambitions because it strikes from the president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, again to the Portuguese enslavement of Africans and ahead to the rise of Trumpism in response to the presidency of Barack Obama.

In addition to interviews and archival photographs, movie clips and news footage, Williams (“Cassandro” “Life, Animated”) leans into animation. In an enticing gambit, the director makes use of a mixture of visible results, portray and collage to inform the tales of the poet Phillis Wheatley; the creator Harriet Jacobs and the journalist and anti-lynching pioneer Ida B. Wells. In a movie brimming with visible gestures, these mini portraits of anti-racists are amongst its most memorable.

Stamped From the Beginning
Rated R for some violent content material, language, drug content material and nude photographs. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. Watch on Netflix.